Welcome to SAAS

Call For Papers for Our Next Conference

"A Return to (What Never Was) Normal: Discourses of (Ab)Normalcy in US Culture, Literature, Arts, and Politics; Past, Present, and Future"

PANEL 1

1) “When the Music Stops… Things Will Be Complicated": Post-Great Recession US or the Decade of Morbid Neoliberalism”
Panel Chair: Fabián Orán Llarena Institution: Universidad de la Laguna
E-mail: forallar@ull.edu.es

The title of the panel makes reference to City Group CEO Chuck Prince's infamous statement in July 2007, when he foreshadowed the financial crisis that would unleash in a few months—and that would lead the US Federal Government to bailing out City Group along with other mammoth financial institutions.

While the Great Recession in the US nominally ended between 2011 and 2012, the myriad crises it either initiated or deepened persisted throughout the decade. Many an observer, relying on Antonio Gramsci's insights, has defined the post-Great Recession years as an interregnum—a period where prevailing hegemonies lose ground and new worldviews fail to fill in the vacuum of legitimacy, favoring a climate of despair and angst. Neoliberalism and its political rationalities—primacy of financial sectors, labor flexibility, globalized flows of capital, disregard for egalitarianism and equality—played a pivotal role in bringing about the financial meltdown and its painful ramifications to housing, wages, and jobs. And yet, despite mildly Neo-Keynesian stabilization, a set of systemic reforms never took place—let alone an overhauling of neoliberal capitalism. This is what political scientist Colin Crouch has called the "strange non-death of neoliberalism," in that the 2010s saw the perpetuation of a politics thoroughly discredited that, nonetheless, continued to shape the US economy throughout the decade.

This panel invites contributions that shed light on the normalization of crisis, that is, on all those fractures and malaises caused and/or worsened by the Great Recession which were not, by any means, overcome by macroeconomic stabilization but, rather, have gone chronic and become part of the social fabric—poverty, the hollowing-out of the middle class, income inequality or structural racism, among others. We welcome papers analyzing films, literary texts, graphic narratives, TV series, and life narratives that portray the way the post-Great Recession context is one where the conditions of the crisis and the precarity wrought by neoliberal politics are integral (i.e., "normal") components of the socioeconomic landscape.

GUIDELINES FOR PARTICIPANTS

Abstracts of Proposals are to be e-mailed directly to the chair of the selected panel using this form. The deadline for submitting abstracts is October 15, 2022. Panel chairs are expected to accept/reject proposals and have panels set up by November 7.

Non-members of SAAS (of all nationalities) are welcome to participate in the conference, but will be required to pay membership dues for one year as well as the conference registration fee. Members of ASA (American Studies Association), AISNA (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nor-Americani), APEAA (Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies) and HELAAS (Hellenic Association for American Studies) need only pay the conference registration fee.

Further guideliness for participants can be found here.